« Getting back to our senses”, or : fundamentals about conscientious sensitized contacts

The reference book “Gestalt-therapy” by Perls, Hefferline and Goodman is vague and imprecise about what Id and awareness in Gestalt-therapy (GT) are about. Terms like “urge”, “appetite”, “dimly aware appetite”, “extreme need”, “extreme physiological deficit or surfeit”, “spontaneous appetite”, “need”, “excitations and stimuli of fore-contact”, “motivational force of the urges and appetites” are, in our view, indiscriminately being used by the founders of GT to refer to levels of experiences and of logic that are fundamentally different and emerge at different points of the sequence of contact. Our working hypothesis, in this lecture, is that claryfying the vagueness in terms of our founders allows access to the essential subtleness and finesse our work as therapists requires, and is essential to GT theory and practice in order to open foundations to a research approach in and for GT that goes beyond partial « in vogue » approaches in the domain of « awareness », using the example of the sense of touching to illustrate proposal .

Lecture presented by Astrid Dusendschön @ EAGT / AAGT joint Conference, Taormina September 2016.